Week 8, Thing 19: Web 2.0 awards

I've tried probably the majority of the web 2.0 awards winners. Web 2.0 is just that fun. Some faves:

Zillow--how can you not like knowing what the retail price is on your and your neighbors' homes? Mesmerizing.

Craigslist--the best part is being able to create custom RSS feeds for your searches. Okay, so I haven't bought anything from a Craigslist listing yet, but I've seen all kinds of cool merchandise. Alas, there is no section of Craigslist for Southern Maryland, probably why I haven't bought anything that's in my RSS feed listings--too far to drive to D.C. or Baltimore areas.

Meebo--great product, I have several patrons who use it because we don't have IM software installed on our machines (who wants to deal with the viruses and spyware?). All your regular options for your favorite IM vendor are there.

Feedburner--cool to see how many people are subscribed to your blog, traffic on your blog, etc. Very easy. Of course, I only have 2 people subscribed to my blog. There were seven subscribed yesterday! That bad, huh? :-)

Pandora--I listen to Pandora sometimes when I edit--I can't listen to anything that I know the words to, because those words get mixed up with the words on the screen. I think it does a pretty good job of picking music that I like.

Picnik--easy photo editing tools, no program to download. You can get pretty good results with it.

Personalized Google--I start here every day. I have modules for Gmail, Google Reader, custom searches, Google Maps, Google Bookmarks, LOLcats, Amazon search hack, and lots more. Loooovvve it.

Some new stuff I tried:

Etsy--a friend of mine is wild about Etsy, and I can see why. It's like going to the hugest craft fair ever without having to either sweat or freeze. Really fun and beautiful handmade things for sale here.

BeGreenNow--a simple calculator for finding out your carbon footprint (the damage you're doing to the earth, basically) and tips for reducing your carbon footprint. You can also purchase carbon offsets--pay the company to do green things on your behalf, such as buying renewable energy, funding reforestation, and supporting technology that helps offset carbon credits. To completely offset my household's carbon usage, I'd have to pay about $20 a month. I'm very seriously considering it--I'm a pretty green person, drive a very efficient car, use fluorescent lightbulbs and other energy-reducing devices, recycle, compost, etc., but it's very difficult to completely offset one's carbon use and this company's efforts may make a serious difference in the fight against global warming (think this summer's drought was just seasonal variation? Think again....)

Biblio--I'm not sure why Biblio won anything. They have fewer books than AbeBooks. It's great that their costs for sellers are lower than other places, but I don't really see anything special about this site, it's just a place with books for sale, and there are lots of those sites out there.

Yelp--was okay, but not a lot of reviews on there yet, at least not in our area. Might have to write a few myself. Would be very useful while traveling, so you can find out what the good restaurants, places to stay, etc., are.

All in all, there are wonderful web 2.0 tools out there. Internet tools are becoming much better integrated, tons of mashups, and as developers see the kind of use that people have for the Internet, they are designing tools that fit the user, rather than the other way around.

Week 8, Thing 18: online office tools

Google Office has improved a lot since I last used it. The spreadsheets are much more sophisticated now, with many more functions. I tend to make large Excel files with a bunch of worksheets and a lot of hyperlinks that need to update as totals update, and Google Spreadsheets now has this function! Love the freezing rows, too. Here's my Google spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=phsMokIEfqvQLatATqhaQLA

I'm not nearly so enthused about Google Docs. I'm a power Word user and I use track changes extensively while editing, use a lot of find and replace with wildcards, and do tons of formatting. But if Google Docs can dream up a better system than Word's endnotes and footnotes, I'd be all for it (no endnotes or footnotes now). And they do have keyboard shortcuts, which I depend on--I can be soooo much faster if I don't have to take my fingers off the keyboard. The sharing features are very cool--RSS feed for changes, email, invite collaborators, create an event with collaborators in Google Calendar (one of the few Google features I don't use--I have to use Outlook for my calendar because it synchronizes with my PDA). And as you can see, I published a document directly to my blog (below). But the export functions are also very nice. They're good tools for a lot of projects.

Hey, this is web 2.0: the Internet is your computer. :-)

Zoho: the word processor style is nicer than Google Docs. (I feel so disloyal! I love you for everything else, Google!) It's more familiar (i.e., looks more like word. :-) It's nice that the HTML tools are right up front--especially layers. I like using layers, especially after building my latest website in Dreamweaver. The template library isn't as big as Micro$oft, but it is also FREE and is just a cool feature. Ooh, you can email docs into your Zoho account. Neato! And again, great sharing and exporting tools. No RSS though.

Zoho Sheet is okay. I don't think it's as easy to use as Google Spreadsheet, but carrying over the basic layout from the word processor is efficient and helps you use the whole suite.

Zoho Show--enhh. Yawn. Without cool templates, it's very, very dull. The good thing would be that you can import PowerPoint files and then export them as HTML or make them publicly available or embed them in a website. But to actually create workable presentations would be mighty difficult.

Zoho Notebook, Zoho's answer to MS OneNote, is really pretty cool, cool enough that I installed the Firefox plugin to play with it some more. For some reason, the images I inserted by URL didn't work, but video worked fine, and there's way cool stuff you can add to your notebook, like RSS feeds, audio, and other files, and you can publish the page online or to your blog and share it with friends.

My Zoho Notebook:


Zoho Wiki, Planner, Chat, and Meeting look like great integrated products, but I'm not so much interested in them. But Zoho Creator, a database program, is definitely something I'm going to look more into. You can create web forms with it and I think it might be an easy way to create an online patron request form. Maybe.

Let's see if the form I made works--try it out! It should email the results of the form to me, so I'm going to try it out myself after I post.


Okay, I officially love Zoho Creator. That was a ten-minute form, tops. :-) Zoho might get my vote for office-type applications, even though I still think Google Spreadsheets is the better Excel knockoff. This kind of FREE software is great for sharing documents between colleagues, for our patrons to be able to save their stuff without having to bring a disk or drive, and heck, for building web forms. I'm really excited about the web forms. I've never bothered learning to do them before, but this is soooo easy. All these options!!

Update: MY FORM WORKED! Thank you, Zoho!

Zoho--Book Club 2007

Second Monday of the month, except for October (third week due to
Columbus Day) and November (third week due to Veterans Day)

January 8th Marley and Me by John Grogan
February 12th The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
March 12th River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest
Journey by Candice Millard
April 9th The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneggar
May 14th The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
June 11th The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder,
Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon
Winchester
July 9th The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason
August 13th Water for Elephants: A Novel by Sara Gruen
September 10th A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
October 15th Widow's War by Sally Gunning
November 19th Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by
Nathaniel Philbrick
December 10th Digging to America by Anne Tyler

Google Docs

Second Monday of the month, except for October (third week due to
Columbus Day) and November (third week due to Veterans Day)

January 8th Marley and Me by John Grogan
February 12th The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
March 12th River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest
Journey by Candice Millard
April 9th The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
May 14th The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
June 11th The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder,
Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon
Winchester
July 9th The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason
August 13th Water for Elephants: A Novel by Sara Gruen
September 10th A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
October 15th Widow's War by Sally Gunning
November 19th Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by
Nathaniel Philbrick
December 10th Digging to America by Anne Tyler

Week 7, Thing 17: Sandbox wiki

One thing already I don't like about this wiki (and it may be all PB wikis): You have to enable Javascript every time you view the page. The Javascript enabler is at the bottom of the page. So you think that there' s nothing on the page, when in fact there is disabled Javascript. How irritating. I put my Librarything catalog on Amy's Librarything but nothing shows on the page if it's on a computer that hasn't had Javascript enabled on that page yet.

The function for "save page as PDF" is great--doesn't work on my Javascript, but the formatting is beautiful, with the little sandwich at the top and the wiki name and page name. The "build a portfolio" function is very cool. Say you were working on a long project or series of projects--you could select the wiki pages that pertain to a report and put them together in a slideshow, PDF, or Word file. Then you could share the files or the URL of the slideshow. I picked some wiki pages that had some reference to 23 things in the title. You can add this particular wiki to Digg or del.icio.us, you can get an RSS feed for changes that are made to the wiki, and you can share the URL or full access to editing the wiki. Even though I don't like the Javascript disfunctionality, the tools available with this wiki software are well in line with other web 2.0 tools--lots of social networking, changeability of formats, easy enough for anyone to do. Excellent tool.

Week 7, Thing 17: Wikis

Wikis can be really useful as an online guide to something. For libraries, it could be computer procedures, customer service procedures, policies, links for continuing education, almost anything. I like the idea of subject guides in a wiki, except that the beauty of digital information is that it doesn't have to put things into rigid categorization (Everything is Miscellaneous is a great book for librarians to read! Really fascinating.). The booklovers site is a great wiki, one that patrons could participate in as well as librarians, contributing reviews and other book content to a local site (though a book review blog intended to be used by librarians and patrons alike I started a couple of years ago didn't work very well at my library). Generally anything that could be in its own small encyclopedia could work very well in a wiki, and the genius of it is open participation--many minds are smarter than one.

Week 6, Thing 15: The future of libraries

I think that Wendy Schultz is right, that the library is way more than books. We are more than our inventory. We are a community. In particular, we are a local community, responsible to our own particular users. As we move along the steps of the experience economy (from commodities/goods [books], to services [answering reference questions], to experiences [warm glow of having a family storytime], to transformation [teaching computer skills to new users]), we need to give our patrons more opportunities to customize their library experience, because individualized service in a community atmosphere is the future. Transformation is when the patron feels like a new or better person from spending time and money in the library--a common transformation for library patrons may be that they feel more like scholars or advanced computer users, from what they learn from us. For our patrons to be transformed by their use of the library requires that they get a personalized experience--everyone's transformation is going to be different. Computers especially allow us to do this (which is the entire premise of Everything is Miscellaneous--I'm a few chapters in)--let's let folks suggest books for purchase online, tag our catalog with useful categories (for heaven's sake, let's get rid of the classification "cookery"!), comment on a library blog, get instant RSS alerts when we add particular things to our catalog.... At the eVisioning conference I hosted a panel discussion on "The Library as Place: Physical and Virtual." Since we had been talking about the user-customized experience in the rest of the conference, my group started talking about what the user-customized library building and library online presence might look like. In one new library, a room that had been designed for a coffee bar that never materialized was taken over by nursing mothers, who then had a place for their other children to play while nursing their babies in a more secluded spot. Wisely, the library let the users define how that space should be used, rather than kicking the moms out! Our patrons should be allowed to design new library buildings and retrofit old ones. They should have space on our website to contribute to the library online community. And they should be in on the design and use of online libraries in Second Life and other communities. The librarian's role is changing--we are becoming facilitators rather than gatekeepers, and it's a much nicer place to be, I believe.

The participation gap (the new digital divide), the transparency problem, and the ethics challenge are things that libraries will have to work with. The millennials, although they are digital natives, may be more comfortable with technology, but they still may not have access to the technologies and skills they will need to be successful participants in American culture. Growing up with lots of media, these young people may not realize how much the media influences them. They also may lack ethical training on web participation, because publishing tools are eliminating the traditional publication tracks where they would have learned ethics from colleagues. Again, like we've seen in Shift Happens, the millennial generation will need lifelong learning skills more than any other generation. And we're going to need better search and finding tools. Like Tim O'Reilly says, "Data is the next Intel inside": data powers the web. We need proper federated search for website databases; Rollyo isn't going to cut it.

I find it interesting that Michael Stephens points out that the 2.0 librarian will have to be a trendspotter. I think he's right. We're going to have to be on the cutting edge of technology and services, and in order to be fiscally responsible in the technology we adopt, we'll need to be able to identify the technologies that will be of the most use to our patrons for the most amount of time. We need to know demographics and social data and ask our patrons what kind of technology they would like to use at the library and why. Being flexible enough to keep up with the pace of technology and modern society will be more important than ever--keep trying new stuff, and if it works, great; if it doesn't, scrap it and find out why. Just like in the learning process, permission to fail will have to be part of the "perpetual beta" of library 2.0.

Stephen J. Dubner, one of the authors of Freakonomics, had an interesting blog post on libraries and the digital economy. He points out that libraries have had an effect on book publishing that publishers may not really like--yes, libraries buy lots of books, but they then lend them out for free. The idea of licensing agreements for books is interesting and the comments are also well worth reading. Libraries are going to have to think about economics in the digital era and how different publishing models are going to affect what libraries can own, use, and lend.

To wrap up, innovation is what library 2.0 needs. The library will have to compete, kind of like a business, for our patrons' time and energy. Just because our things are "free" (if you're paying taxes, the library isn't free!) doesn't mean that people will use them. The library will have to be more memorable, create a better experience, allow patrons to create their own individualized library environment and services. It's within our reach. Fortune favors the bold--we just have to jump in.